One thing that’s really come home for me after all this ‘Muh Russia!’ BS isn’t just how corrupt the process is, but how it’s paradoxically the election laws that have made it so corrupt. First of all, you need to surround yourself with lawyers as staffers, then you need to maintain various degrees of expensive separation from all the sleaze-mongers you have working for you (usually lawyers or former gov investigators).

Naturally, this is all very expensive (See: Hillary 2016’s +$1 billion price tag) so a candidate has to whore themselves out to every sleazy big $$$ interest under the sun just to play.

The whole thing functions as what economists would call a barrier to entry, which is what makes Trump so dangerous to the establishment — he’s threatened what amounts to a political cartel.